Elaine was wearing a boy's dress shirt--white, with a button-down collar, though she never buttoned the collar, and she always left the top two buttons unbuttoned. Now she untucked the shirt from her jeans; she pinched the shirt between her thumb and index finger, and, holding it away from her stick-thin body, she blew on her chest to cool herself off.
"Do you have a hard-on now?" she asked me; she'd opened the window a crack before lying down on the bed beside me.
"No--I must be too nervous," I told her.
"Don't be nervous. We're just kissing and touching, right?" Elaine asked me.
"Right," I said.
I could feel a razor-sharp draft of cold air from the cracked-open window when Elaine kissed me, a chaste little peck on the lips, which must have been as disappointing to her as it was to me--because she said, "Tongues are okay. French kissing is allowed."
The next kiss was much more interesting--tongues change everything. There is a gathering momentum to French kissing; Elaine and I were unfamiliar with what to do about it. Perhaps to distract myself, I thought of my mother overseeing my wayward father kissing someone else. There's a waywardness to French kissing, I remember thinking. Elaine must have needed to distract herself, too. She broke free from our kiss and breathlessly said, "Not the Everly Brothers again!" I'd been unaware of what was playing on the rock-'n'-roll station, but Elaine rolled away from me; reaching for her night table, she turned the radio off.
"I want to be able to hear us breathing," Elaine said, rolling into my arms again.
Yes, I thought--breathing is very different when you're French kissing someone. I lifted her untucked shirt and tentatively touched her bare stomach; she slid my hand up to her breast--well, to her bra, anyway--which was soft and small and fit easily in the palm of my hand.
"Is this a . . . training bra?" I asked her.
"It's a padded bra," Elaine said. "I don't know about the training part."
"It feels nice," I told her. I wasn't lying; the training word had triggered something, though I wasn't sure exactly what I held in the palm of my hand. (I mean, how much of what I felt was her breast--or was it mostly the bra?)
Elaine, as if heralding what our future relationship would become, must have read my mind, for she said--as always, loud and clear--"There's more padding than breast, if you want to know the truth, Billy. Here, I'll show you," she said; she sat up and unbuttoned the white shirt, slipping it off her shoulders.
It was a pretty bra, more pearl-gray than white, and when she reached behind her back to unfasten it, her bra seemed to expand. I had only a glimpse of her small, pointy breasts before she put her shirt back on; her nipples were bigger than any boy's, and those darker-colored rings around the nipples--the areolae, another unpronounceable plural!--were almost as big as her breasts. But while Elaine was buttoning her shirt, it was her bra--now on the bed, between us--that captured my attention. I picked it up; the soft, breast-shaped pads were sewn into the silky fabric. To my surprise, I instantly wanted to try it on--I wanted to know what it felt like to wear a bra. But I was no more honest about this feeling than I'd been about those other desires I had withheld from my friend Elaine.
It was only the slightest deviation from the norm that signaled to me a fallen boundary in our emerging relationship: As always, Elaine had left the top two buttons of her boy's dress shirt unbuttoned, but this time she'd also left the bottommost button unbuttoned. My hand slipped more easily under her untucked shirt; it was the real thing (what little there was of it) that fit so perfectly in my palm.
"I don't know about you, Billy," Elaine said, as we lay face-to-face on one of her pillows, "but I had always imagined a boy touching my breasts for the first time as messier than it actually is."
"Messier," I repeated. I must have been stalling.
I was remembering Dr. Harlow's annual morning-meeting talk to us boys, concerning our treatable afflictions; I was recalling that "an unwelcome sexual attraction to other boys and men" fell into this dubiously curable category.
I must have repressed the annual morning-meeting presentation of Dr. Grau--"Herr Doktor" Grau, as we boys called Favorite River's school psychiatrist. Dr. Grau gave us the same lunatic spiel every year--how we were all of an age of arrested development, "frozen," the Herr Doktor said, "like bugs in amber." (By our frightened expressions, we boys could tell that not all of us had seen bugs in amber--or even knew what they were.) "You are in the polymorphous-perverse phase," Dr. Grau assured us. "It is only natural, at this phase, that you exhibit infantile sexual tendencies, in which the genitals are not yet identified as the sole or principal sexual organs." (But how could we fail to recognize such an obvious thing about our genitals? we boys thought with alarm.) "At this phase," Herr Doktor Grau continued, "coitus is not necessarily the recognizable goal of erotic activity." (Then why did we think about coitus nonstop? we boys wondered with dread.) "You are experiencing pregenital libidinal fixations," old Grau told us, as if this were somehow reassuring. (He also taught German at the academy, in the same unintelligible fashion.) "You must come talk to me about these fixations," the old Austrian always concluded. (No boy I knew at Favorite River admitted to having such fixations; no one I knew ever talked to Dr. Grau about anything!)
Richard Abbott told me and the cast of The Tempest that Ariel's gender was "polymorphous--more a matter of habiliment than anything organic." This later led Richard to conclude that the gender of the character I played was "mutable," and I was further confused regarding my (and Ariel's) sexual orientation.
Yet, when I asked Richard if he meant anything at all resembling the "polymorphous-perverse phase" of the "bugs in amber" bullshit Dr. Grau had gone on (and on) about in morning meeting, Richard adamantly denied there was any connection.
"No one listens to old Grau, Bill," Richard had told me. "Don't you listen to him, either."
Wise advice--but while it was possible not to heed what Dr. Grau said, we boys were forced to hear him. And, lying next to Elaine, with my hand on her bare breast, and our tongues once more entangled in a way that made us imagine what the next most erotic thing to do with each other was, I became aware of my growing erection.
With our mouths still pressed together, Elaine managed to ask: "Are you getting a hard-on yet?" Yes, I was, and I'd noted Elaine's impatience in her overloud utterance of the yet word, but my confusion was such that I was unsure what had initiated my erection.
Yes, the French kissing was exciting, and (to this day) the touch of a woman's bare breasts is not something I am indifferent to; yet I believe my hard-on began when I imagined wearing Elaine's padded bra. At that moment, wasn't I exhibiting the "infantile sexual tendencies" Dr. Grau had warned us boys about?
But all I said to Elaine, in the midst of our darting tongues, was a strangled-sounding "Yes!"
This time, when Elaine broke free from me, she bit my lower lip in the hurried-up process. "You actually have a boner," Elaine said to me, seriously.
"Yes, I actually do," I admitted. I felt my lower lip, to be sure I wasn't bleeding. (I was looking all around for her bra.)
"Oh, God--I don't want to see it!" Elaine cried. This was sexually confusing to me, too. I hadn't suggested showing my hard-on to her! I didn't want her to see it. In fact, I would have been embarrassed for her to see it; I thought it would probably disappoint her, or make her laugh (or throw up).
"Maybe I could just touch it," Elaine considered, more thoughtfully. "I don't mean your bare boner!" she quickly added. "Maybe I could just feel it--I mean, through your clothes."